Well, we were already planning on releasing part or all of the board schematic, so I don't see that there would be any significant IP issues. We have a lot of experience with making sure that the artwork is done right for high-quality signaling. A fair amount of adjustment might have to be made by our engineers if volunteers did it who are not familiar with some of the constraints.
My boss wants to talk to his boss about it before we endorse that. However, there's no reason why you can't start a parallel effort, and if there's some sort of legal problem, we may have to ignore what the community did. Of course, the community could do their own board and license the chip IP from us do that we can recoup the chip design costs (plus money to invest in the next generation). However, volunteers are not likely to be able to afford actually MANUFACTURING boards. I'll let you know if this interferes with our basic intent of "selling hardware" in some way. The general idea is to have the software done by volunteers, and we do the hardware. We would share many aspects of the hardware, but the rights to the hardware implementation would belong to Tech Source. The thing about the board design, though, is that there's nothing particularly sensitive in it... I think. On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 14:42:47 -0800, Jeff Carr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Do you think a board layout effort can begin at this point? I checked > the mailing lists (as I am newly subscribed) and only found a mid-Dec. > reference to gEDA > http://lists.duskglow.com/open-graphics/2004-December/001275.html > > I think it is worth beginning this process, but I have never used these > tools. I've seen the commercial equivalents, but never spent much time > learning them because I didn't want to waste my time learning non-free > software. (aka soon-to-be-dead software) > > Does anyone know if the free tools we have available to us are capable > of the job? I'd love to see free tools used to design this card. So for > the last few days I've begun the process of learning pcb (from cvs). > > A lot of work could be done now couldn't it? Do you guys know which chip > you are going to use? There has been talk of Xilinx, is there a > currently shipping part? Things should already be possible to get in > place: where the memory goes, where the clocks and power go, etc. The > PCI and/or AGP connectors and all the lines off of them. The VGA or DVI > connectors and so on. It doesn't even look like there are those standard > connectors in the library yet. (?) > http://www.geda.seul.org/tools/symbols/library/index.html > > At any rate, there's a mountain of work there so I thought I would ask > if there are people on this list with that kind of background. It's > unlikely that an effort of this size has been undertaken with completely > free software, if it has, it's probably worth investigating the issues, > software & methods they used to collaborate this kind of unique > development project. > > For me, I could write the firmware support (u-boot, linuxbios and maybe > openfirmware) support and do powerpc work. As time permits of course. > > An annoyed ATI video card user, > Jeff Carr > _______________________________________________ > Open-graphics mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics > List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com) > _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
